Book Reviews: Shakespeare and Text, Shakespeare in Parts, English Renaissance Drama, the Roman Actor: A tragedy, a Margarite of America, Shakespeare vu d'Allemagne et de France des Lumières au Romantisme, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine, Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan

2008 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
David Bevington ◽  
Rob Conkie ◽  
Jessica Dyson ◽  
Agnes Lafont ◽  
Agnes Lafont ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
English Renaissance Drama

Nobody, Somebody, and King Lear

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Womack
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
The University

The approximately contemporary Jacobean plays, King Lear and Nobody and Somebody, share an ancient British setting, a preoccupation with instability in the state, and an unsettling interest in negation. Peter Womack here suggests that by reading them together we can retrieve some of the theatrical strangeness which the more famous of the two has lost through familiarity and naturalization. The dramatic mode of existence of the character called ‘Nobody’ is paradoxical, denaturing – an early modern visual and verbal Verfremdungseffekt, at once philosophical and clownish. His negativity, which is articulated in dialogue with the companion figure of ‘Somebody’, is matched in King Lear, above all in the role of Edgar, but also by a more diffused state of being (withdrawal, effacement, folly) which the play generates in reaction to its positive events. Ultimately the negation in both plays is social in character: ‘Nobody’ is the dramatic face of the poor and oppressed. Peter Womack teaches literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is English Renaissance Drama (2006), in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series.

Reviews: Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures, a Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, a Christian Turned Turk, the Renegado, Material London, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, Volume II: Shaftesbury to Hume, the English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic ArgumentBakerDenise N. (ed.), Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures , State University of New York Press, 2000, pp. ix + 277, $68.50, $22.95 pb.GreenRichard Firth, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England , University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. xvi + 496, £59.50.HackettHelen, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance , Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. viii + 235, £35.VitkusDaniel J. (ed.), Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, The Renegado , Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 358, £31.50, £12 pb.OrlinLena Cowen (ed.), Material London c. 1600 , University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, pp. ix + 393, $65, $26.50 pb; McKellarElizabeth, The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City, 1660–1720 , Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. xvii + 245, £45, £17.99 pb.SharpeKevin, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-century Politics , Cambridge University Press, 2000, xvii + 475 pp., £50.00, £17.95 pb.RiversIsabel, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, Volume II: Shaftesbury to Hume , Cambridge University Press, 2000, xiv + 386 pp., £45.00.FerrellLori Anne and McCulloughPeter (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750 , Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. x + 270, £48.GilroyAmanda (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775– 1844 , Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. xii + 260, £17.99; ChardChloe, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 , Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. ix + 278, £45.RobertsDaniel Sanjiv, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument , Liverpool University Press, 2000, pp. xxii + 311, £34, £16.00 pb.; WhaleJohn, Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility , Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. xii + 240, £37.50.

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-108
Author(s):  
Anne Curry ◽  
Michael Hicks ◽  
Elizabeth Traux ◽  
Peter Clark ◽  
Tai Liu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Romance Fiction ◽  
French And English
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